A Psychometric Evaluation of the Standardized Assessment of Severity of Personality Disorder (SASPD) in Nonclinical and Clinical German Samples

The Standardized Assessment of Severity of Personality Disorder (SASPD) is a 9-item self-report screening instrument and was developed to assess personality disorder (PD) severity according to the initial proposal of ICD-11. Our aim was to investigate the psychometric properties of the German version of the SASPD in nonclinical and clinical samples. A total of 1,991 participants (N = 888 from nonclinical and N = 1,103 from clinical samples) provided ratings on the SASPD as well as other measures of psychopathology and personality. We examined the SASPD regarding its factor structure, internal consistency, and construct validity. A unidimensional structure of the SASPD provided inadequate model fit, whereas a 3-factor solution provided good fit in both the nonclinical and clinical samples. Internal consistency of the SASPD total score was acceptable in the clinical and nonclinical samples based on this multifactorial model. In terms of convergent validity, SASPD scores correlated fairly with other measures of PD severity across samples. Discriminant validity with measures of general symptom distress and measures of (normal) personality traits was mixed. In addition, the SASPD scores predicted levels of PD severity above and beyond a measure of symptom distress. The SASPD captures some theoretically expected features of PD severity. However, the multidimensional structure and limited convergent and discriminant validity may hamper future usage of the SASPD as a short screening tool of PD severity according to ICD-11. Public Significance Statement Personality disorders (PD) are prevalent, underdiagnosed, and affect clinical trajectories of psychiatric patients. The SASPD has been developed as a screening tool for PD severity according to the dimensional model of the initial ICD-11 proposal. We show that the SASPD total score might be useful as an indicator for a heterogeneous mixture of PD features, but less as a unidimensional measure of PD severity.